Robert P. Dickson, MD

robert p. dickson, md

Assistant Professor, Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine

Dr. Dickson is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine in the Department of Medicine at the University of Michigan. He received his undergraduate degree from St. John's College in 2000, an M.D. from Duke University in 2007, and completed his Internal Medicine residency at the University of Washington in 2011, after which he served as Chief Medical Resident at Harborview Medical Center from 2011-2012. He completed his fellowship in Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at the University of Michigan and has been a member of the faculty since 2014.

Dr. Dickson's research focuses on understanding the mechanisms by which microbial communities in the respiratory tract mediate respiratory illness and health. Utilizing culture-independent techniques of microbial identification, he studies how changes in the lung microbiome interact with host factors, clinical interventions and patient outcomes in order to generate novel mechanistic hypotheses regarding the pathogenesis of respiratory infections and inflammatory lung disease. His laboratory performs integrative translational research, spanning from molecular characterization of respiratory microbiota to animal modeling of acute lung disease to prospective trials of human subjects. Areas of clinical interest include the acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), lung transplantation and the healthy respiratory tract. His work is supported by the NIH/NHLBI T32 Multidisciplinary Training Program in Lung Diseases, the Michigan Institute for Clinical & Health Research (MICHR) and by the University of Michigan's Host Microbiome Initiative.